Saint Peter’s University and the CarePoint Health Foundation will hold a conference Oct. 7 on “The Campus Accountability and Safety Act: Navigating Compliance Issues and the Challenges of Campus Sexual Assaults” to which all New Jersey college and university presidents have been invited to attend.

“We are going to first try to educate on and raise awareness of the level of the problem we have and in the second half we will try to educate on the regulations we all have to deal with,” Saint Peter’s University President Eugene Cornacchia said today. “People have a growing awareness of the sexual violence on campuses but many are not aware of what is expected of universities and colleges in dealing with this.”

The Campus Accountability and Safety Act is a bipartisan bill and is expected to be signed into law in the fall, Cornacchia said. It takes aim at sexual assaults on college campuses and also requires schools to release data about campus attacks. Colleges and universities that fail to comply with the law will face significant financial penalties.

Cornacchia said the act “will reduce the flexibility colleges and universities have had on how they report and treat cases of alleged sexual violence on campus. There is movement to require involvement of police right from the start when there is a claim of sexual violence. Right now there is a lot of discretion in when and how colleges and universities report alleged sexual assaults. There is a desire to not have them swept under the rug.”

The panel of experts to speak at the event includes Patricia Teffenhart, executive director of the NJ Coalition Against Sexual Assault; Ruth Anne Koenick, director of the office for violence prevention and victim assistance at Rutgers University; La’Shawn Rivera, director of sexual violence response at Columbia University and Michelle Fine, distinguished professor at CUNY Graduate Center, said CarePoint Foundation Vice-President Paula Nevoso.

CarePoint Health Foundation Vice President Paula A. Nevoso addresses a group at Christ Hospital in Jersey City on April 24, 2014. Jonathan Lin/The Jersey Journal.

CarePoint Health Christ Hospital in Jersey City is Hudson County’s designated sexual assault victim crisis center, and Nevoso said that “Through the foundation’s relationship with the crisis center, we realized the sexual assaults on college campuses was a significant national issue.” She said this knowledge drove the foundation to partner with St. Peter’s and set up the conference.

“From a foundation’s point of view, the conference is to raise awareness about a very serious issue, very much like the human trafficking conference we had at St. Peter’s last year,” said Nevoso, whose foundation is funded by grants and donations. “Our goal with this conference is to create a universal consensus among the universities on how to best handle incidents of sexual assaults on campuses. All student have a right to be safe on their campus.”

Cornacchia said recent statistics show that six percent of college males are sexually assaulted. He said many campus sexual assaults go unreported because victims feel they will be judged if they come forward and the conference will focus on that as well.

“We try to make them feel they are not responsibility for what happened to them, and let them know there are people who care about them,” Cornacchia said. “For too long the process did not support the victim. All of this is being addressed by the new regulations. We protect the victim and make them understand that coming forward is not going to make it worse for them, but will give them the kind of help they will need in putting their lives’ together again.”

Nevoso said various state officials, community leaders and non-profit leaders have also been invited to attend the conference on Oct. 7 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in The Duncan Family Sky Room of the Mac Mahon Student Center at Saint Peter’s in Jersey City.

Nevoso added that, “We are very proud that we are now a community-based foundation that not only raises money to give back to the community, but feels a responsibility to open up a dialogue on serious issues in order to serve residents better.”